SeoBlackhat.co.uk

Verifying Your PAGE is the Right Theme
Okay, this is a quick update today. We know how vital Theme-based sites can be for our rankings in Google. Calling them Silos, Themes, Sub-Themes, or whatever you wish, having the proper theme is one of the key components to top ranking. Too many Webmasters make the mistake of just looking at their overall site’s theme, instead of looking at the individual page’s theme.

I stumbled across this last week with Barry Byers and Michael Cloake of Sesimi and I have been testing hard on it and achieved some good results. By the way, if you are looking for a good partner to outsource your overflow SEO work to, Barry and Michael know their stuff.

Problem: You may think a page is a certain theme, but Google maybe scoring it differently. Therefore, your ranking isn’t as high as you know it should be and it is driving you nuts.

Solution: Ask Google direct what the theme is for the page in question.

Reality: My testing has shown that while a site may have a strong “theme” the individual pages are lacking certain elements or Google is scoring the sub-page in areas that were ONCE the intention of the page, but the focus has changed. However, because the page is being scored on the old theme, the page becomes a detriment instead of an asset in your SEO campaign. In other words, the content of the page doesn’t match how Google has scored the page’s theme, therefore, the page is hurting your SEO efforts rather than helping.

What to Do:

First we will check the theme of your home page, then the theme of a sub-page and then we will analyze the results.

Step One: Open the Google External Keyword Tool.

1) If youre an affiliate, and you are directly linking to the merchants page with your affiliate code, change the CTA to /yourdomain.com/buy/ and do a 301 redirect to the merchant.
2) Make sure your Title tag is unique and contains the targeted keyword phrase.
3) Ditto with the Meta Description.
4) Ditto with the H1 tag.
5) Get the Privacy, Contact Us, About Us, Terms, etc. on the page if they arent already there.
6) Put the keyword phrase at the bottom of the page, just above the footer links. But dont link it to anything.
7) Use it at least twice in the body of the page.
Get some good solid links 5-10 or so to your landing page. As strange as it sounds, getting links from pages that are cached and it gets spidered by GoogleBot has helped in the slap – but not consistently.